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REVIEW: Brutal Legend

Lisvender reviews Brutal Legend. Available on PS3 and Xbox 360. Developed by Double Fine. Published by EA

I can’t help but wonder how many gamers are going to pretend they’ve always loved heavy metal music after they play this game.

Remember the hype-roar over Bioshock and its Art Deco design, and its Ayn Rand themes? So original! It seemed like everybody wanted to learn more about these revolutionary concepts once that game came out. We gamers are a sheltered lot. We really need to get out and read more. Video games can’t be our sole window into history. It’s not healthy. Besides, Grim Fandango did the Art Deco thing long before Bioshock, and it’s a better game. By the way, Tim Schafer, who wrote and directed Brutal Legend, also wrote and directed Grim Fandango, which I have to say is the superior game.

After playing Brutal Legend, I don’t think I’ll ever be a heavy metal fan. The game just doesn’t sell it well, and all those revving guitars sound the same after a while. I’m an 80s child, though, so synthesized pop is more my thing, and this game just isn’t meant for me. The fantasy land of Brutal Legend, which exhumes and fetishizes the sound and fury of the “metal experience,” is clearly built to appeal to people who lived during the music’s heyday. I’m not sure it’s sensible, though, for Double Fine to aim for an audience that pines so strongly for the past. Are the forty-somethings who spin their Def Leppard vinyl on their creaky turntables for fun also very likely to play modern video games on Xbox 360s or Playstation 3s?

Eddie Riggs, the hero of Brutal Legend, complains that he wasn’t born in the right time for metal either. This is just before he is flattened by a collapsing stage set, and transported to a mythical world by the metal god Ormagoden. Apparently, Eddie has no family or friends in our world, or else he has a command of incredible coping skills, because his reaction to this dangerous new place is more or less, “Coooooool!” I’m guessing that Eddie is a veteran of a few tours in the Iraq War, because he never questions his unexplained combat skills, nor does he display a hint of fear at the murderous beings marching in his way. At one point he is directly asked if he misses his old home, and he replies with only a dismissive sputter. I realize that Eddie is supposed to be a badass, but I’d find that easier to swallow if he had grown up in this harsh place, rather than just suddenly been thrown into it after years of soft American life.

There are plenty of other problems with the story, but I won’t go into them all. I’m the sort of asshole who picks at the logic in movies like Back to the Future when I should just relax and have fun with them. Brutal Legend’s story is fun, and funny, but Tim Schafer has written stronger, more interesting stuff than this, like the aforementioned Grim Fandango.

Brutal Legend, the game, is different from Brutal Legend, the tale. Instead of focusing on the tastes of a specific type of player, the gameplay goes all over the place, trying to please everyone at once. The game starts by giving you a hand axe, and throwing some enemies in front of you. “Here,” says the game, “enjoy some chop-em-up action not far removed from God of War or Spartan Total Warrior.”

“Fine,” you respond, “let’s chop up some monsters!” You chop up monsters for a few minutes, and then the game gives you a guitar.

“Here,” says the game, “this is your secondary weapon, and it uses elemental powers like lightning and fire, similar to the plasmids in Bioshock.”

“Cool,” says you, “let’s rock out!” You burn enemies with lightning and fire, then tear down a building with an earth-shaking chord, and then a few minutes later, you get a car.

What is the point of this car? I really don’t understand the car. It looks cool, and it uses decent enough physics, but from a practical standpoint, it’s fatuous. In the small-scale missions to come, Eddie can’t use it, and in the large-scale battles he won’t need it. Why is there a car?

The answer is, “Because the game world is big, and you’ll need a car to get from place to place in a reasonable amount of time.”

This is not a good answer, because it raises more questions. Why is the game world so big that getting around on foot isn’t reasonable?

The only answer I can think of is, “Because other games have big worlds too.”

I’m being honest here: I see no reason for Brutal Legend to have a big, open world, other than to fill the game with long stretches of driving and to flesh out a feature list.
What’s worse is that Double Fine went with “big open world” first, then came up with “things to do in big open world” second. There are all these little side missions scattered around the map, but they’re really not that interesting, and there are only three or four styles of them. You have enemy ambushes, which are simple chop-em-up skirmishes, turret battles where you fire on enemies from a raised hydraulic lift, cannon firing missions that require you to set targets for long-range artillery, and races. That’s right, you can’t have a car in a video game unless it’s entered in a race at some point. There are also little things to look for like dragon statues (120 to find!), legend spheres that tell a needless backstory, and binoculars so you can get a good look at some of those fancy landmarks Double Fine’s artists spent so much time laboring over. Look! A mountain shaped like a pair of hands clutching a guitar! Awesome, sort of!

These distractions from the main missions are all optional, so why would anyone bother to roll around the world for several minutes at a time to take them on? For upgrades, of course!

Completing missions earns you “fire tributes,” which are really just money, and which are spent at Motor Forges to buy attacks, guitar strings, special effects for your axe, and weaponry for your car. The shopkeeper, called the Guardian of Metal, is voiced by Ozzy Osbourne, and he’s excellent. I hope he continues to do voice acting for games, because he’s great. The Motor Forges themselves, however, are not great. Why does this game have upgrades? I mean, really? Uncharted 2 doesn’t have upgrades, and that was a pretty good game. The effects of Brutal Legend’s upgrades are hardly noticeable. What’s the point? Why am I using the precious gift of life to drive around a big, empty video game world to complete stupid side missions to collect fire tributes to buy upgrades that don’t do anything?

The big open world in Brutal Legend is filler. It’s a joke. It’s not as ugly, but it’s certainly as unnecessary as No More Heroes’s Santa Destroy. Don’t waste your time with it. Just drive from primary mission to primary mission; it’s the way the game should have been made.

And what is there to say about the primary line of missions in Brutal Legend? It’s action! It’s strategy! It’s stractegy! You’re going to fight some big battles that Eddie can’t win alone, upgrades or no upgrades. The game gives you a stage that acts as your base, and a crowd of friendly characters that acts as your army. Your goal in these battles is to get your dudes to the enemy’s stage and destroy it. You control Eddie, contributing to the battle with his attacks, while issuing commands to your soldiers. It’s like Battalion Wars, only not as logical. In Battalion Wars, it makes sense that units with flamethrowers will be pretty effective against enemy infantry, while units with rocket launchers will be more useful against tanks. In Brutal Legend, you’ve got these headbanger dudes, and chicks who tote rifles ripped from the spines of mutant hogs. There are also guys with big hands, and roadies who heft giant amps on their backs. How do you divide tasks among an army like that? There’s some kind of logic to the system, but the action is too hectic, and the missions too varied to really figure it out and exploit it. Simply overwhelming your enemies with sheer numbers doesn’t always work either. You can throw a horde of guys at a tiny group of enemies, turn to other matters for a minute, and still come back to find your dudes dead. The surest way to win a fight is constantly babysit your soldiers. You need to stay near them, fight alongside them, and buff them incessantly.

You also need to keep an eye on your merchandise booths, which are like the gas refineries in Starcraft. There are these fan geysers in Brutal Legend, see, which spew gaseous fans that somehow act as resources for your war machine. You “spend” fans to make more soldiers. To collect fans, you have to construct merch booths over the geysers by playing a riff on your guitar near the geyser. Once the booth is ready, the fans flow to your stage. Sometimes the computer will sneak its men past your army so it can destroy your booths and cripple your production. All this chaos is manageable because Eddie sprouts a pair of wings when you click the left stick, and he can fly about the battlefield to keep an eye on things.

Note that in order to protect that very important big open world from obsolescence, the game only allows you to fly during these stage battles.

The stage battles are actually pretty fun once you get a grasp on them, so much so that you’ll be disappointed that there are so few of them. The single-player campaign is surprisingly short, even with all the driving, and I think that Double Fine is banking on the game surviving just a little bit longer through a multiplayer following. I’m not the person to ask about multiplayer, though, as I hate playing games online, and I’ve never won a real-time strategy match against another human being.

It’s hard to say exactly what Brutal Legend’s problem is. I suppose you could say that Brutal Legend, like Psychonauts before it, has an inferiority complex. It tries so hard to fit in with the other games, when it should really just concentrate on what makes it unique. Brutal Legend would be so much better as a long, linear series of increasingly challenging stage battles with cutscenes in between, than as what it is: a hodge-podge of mixed missions pinned together with a weak Grand Theft Auto structure. This is a problem with a lot of games these days, and I hope that people will come to look at Brutal Legend as an example of the perils of me-tooism. Grand Theft Auto’s cities are features that grew out of game’s unique action of carjacking, just as Super Mario Bros.’s blocks and enemy designs grew out of Mario’s jumping. Games like No More Heroes, Infamous, and now Brutal Legend, don’t need to copy the mainstream to be great. Fuck the establishment man, and sing your own tune. Isn’t that part of the spirit of heavy metal in the first place?

Controller1.com Rating 1/3
lisvender

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